number 34 • Winter 2018

The Public Interest

Five long hot summers and how they grew

Summer 1968

ON THE racial scene, speeches and behavior that would have been unthinkable five years ago, at the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham campaign have become commonplace. The climate of the American racial conflict has escalated and actually sustained an inversion of values. The early nonviolent bargaining mode which featured moral suasion and dramatic appeals to conscience has given way to equally dramatic coercive threats of riot and violence.